PHOENIX — City planners and community members hope to transform neighborhoods and green space surrounding the 20-mile Rio Salado corridor in south Phoenix into a destination filled with mixed-use developments, trails, housing and more.
For artist, gallery owner and south Phoenix advocate, Samuel Gomez, the neighborhoods between downtown and South Mountain hold something irreplaceable.
"A culture of many colors, of culture of different rhythms, of different flavors,” Gomez said.
"It is the soul of Phoenix."
His gallery and community space, The Sagrado Galleria, pays homage to what it once was: a watermelon stand in South Phoenix’s agricultural era.
Among the local art on the walls, he hangs community sketches, development ideas and dreams for south Phoenix.
"People like myself and others that are doing community work, we're just like the painters, and we're here to try to paint a picture,” Gomez said. "Revitalization through representation, as well as uplifting the culture that's here, the talent that is here. I think it's been underserved and underinvested.”
The RIO PHX plan is the next iteration of the years-long Rio Reimagined Project, to cultivate the area around the Rio Salado along south Phoenix. The first phase of the RIO PHX plan includes the Rio Salado District from Interstate 17 to South Broadway Road and from 32nd Street to 19th Avenue.
"This project in particular, I think it's a really cool opportunity,” city planner Enrique Bojorquez Gaxiola said. "It essentially proposes a vision to guide development beyond the riverbanks.”
Surveys show people in that planning area want to see more shade, fresh food, farmers markets, and communities that are walkable.
The city also purchased 30 acres of land last year off 7th Street just south of the Rio Salado for the ongoing project. The draft plan outlines what the city wants to see for that space.
"Opportunities for retail businesses, as well as community space, and then potentially some, you know, residential uses in the future,” Bojorquez Gaxiola said. "Amenities that would help bring and just create a destination along the banks of the of the river."
For passionate south Phoenix players like Gomez, it all sounds like a step in the right direction, as long as there’s follow-through.
"Like this soup of cultures, it's all there, and if we are not honoring that, then you know we are falling into an identity crisis,” Gomez said.
